September 22, 2019

Lazy Day.

Truman isn’t much of a cuddler. When I lay down on the couch the best I can hope for is “cat adjacent”. I’m perfectly fine with this.

Mobility.

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

I have a lot of respect for this guy. I don’t know who he is, I don’t know what he’s working on, nor do I know where he is working. I do know that he’s using a Mac in a public space in a seemingly good spot to get some work done. I find that awesome.

I’ve always had dreams of being a Digital Nomad. I love the idea of working remotely and I’m quite fortunate to be a company-sanctioned telecommuter, but I have a habit of setting up shop in my home office and doing all my work from there, rather than taking advantage of the digital tools available to me and working where I need to.

I do find I get more things done when I change up the scenery a bit. I like the white noise of a coffee shop while I’m working. I can’t have headphones in; I’m more of the type to have music playing in the background, which adds to the general ambiance of a room. I have specific needs to not throw off my concentration, and I occasionally have a hard time finding that at home. Getting out of the office more often would definitely help my concentration.

A couple of years ago work gave me a Windows 10 Dell Laptop, saying I had to make the switch due to security concerns on the network. Frankly I never turned in the company assigned Mac equipment I was given when I joined the company back in 2015, so I still use it from time to time. The Retina display, and the entire experience for that matter, far outshines the Windows 10 experience I have on my Dell laptop. I don’t know how anyone, in this day and age, can think a display resolution of 1366×768 can lend itself to any sort of productive endeavor, especially since Microsoft tries to cram everything and the kitchen sink into ribbons and buttons and advertising in their latest incarnations of Office products.

I’m going to have to read up on the Bring-Your-Own-Device policy at work to see if I can get back to a company-sanctioned Mac platform again. I already structure my day so I have meetings in the morning and development time in the afternoon. If I can maintain these two constants, I might be working from a local coffee shop sooner than later.

Then I can really get some stuff done.

Testing.

I am making updates to the infrastructure of code that runs my installation of WordPress for this blog. Since this blog is self-hosted, I’m responsible for making sure it runs like it should after I patch updates and the like. Luckily I haven’t tricked out the software too much; updates generally go smoothly.

If you can read this, the test has been successful.

If you can still read this, the test continues to be successful.

OK, so the third upgrade I did didn’t work. You couldn’t read the third iteration of the sentence of “if you can still read this…”

For the technically minded, I’m moving to newer versions of PHP on the server. I didn’t get things to where I wanted to be, but things are where they need to be. It works for me.